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This is my interpretation of Helena Walker, the protagonist of the Ark animated series on Paramount+. Since the character is from Australia, I thought her darker complexion suggested Aboriginal ancestry, so that’s how I chose to portray her, even giving her some face paint to further highlight that heritage. Plus, you have to admit tribal face paint suits the franchise’s wilderness survival theme very well.
quote:Originally posted by Tyrannohotep: This character would be an Egyptian gladiatrix who fights for the entertainment of Roman audiences. The design isn’t necessarily meant to be all that historically accurate, but given that female gladiators are known from Roman records (albeit not commonly) and that Egypt was among the Roman Empire’s most economically important provinces, the existence of a character like her shouldn’t be beyond possibility.
By the way, I wanted to try out a “cel-shading” approach (like you see in hand-drawn animation) with this piece, which is why the highlights and shaded areas have sharper edges than in most of my other work.
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In the Roman Colosseum, our Egyptian gladiatrix heroine has just delivered a lethal blow to her Germanic opponent! Whichever fighter they’re rooting for, you can see the Roman spectators are loving this!
If you’re wondering what those big leggings the German girl has on, they are supposed to be thick padded cloth which some gladiators would wear on their arms and legs.
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This is my rendition of "Lucy", a female specimen of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis which lived in Africa between 4 and 3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch. Like all hominins, Lucy would have been capable of walking upright, but her species's relatively long forelimbs and curved finger bones suggest a superior climbing ability to modern humans that they would have retained from earlier ape ancestors.
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These Deinonychus antirrhopus have their hungry eyes on a juvenile Sauroposeidon proteles deep in the forest of North America around 115 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous Period. If the young sauropod can shake the feathered predators off and reach adulthood, it will become one of the largest dinosaurs of all time, with a length ranging between 89 and 112 feet and a mass of 44 to 66 tons.
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This is another depiction of mine of the scholar Hypatia of Alexandria, who lived and studied in Roman Egypt until she died in 415 AD. A teacher and scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy who also built scientific instruments such as astrolabes and hydrometers, she became an adviser to the Roman prefect Orestes, whose conflict with the Christian bishop Cyril would ultimately drag her into the early Christian community's crosshairs. Hypatia would face a brutal death at the hands of a Christian mob who had her stripped naked and assaulted with ostraka (possibly meaning either roof tiles or oyster shells), dragged through the streets of Alexandria, and set her remains on fire. Some historians have claimed Hypatia's murder represents the "death of classical antiquity" at the hands of religious fanaticism, but it should be noted that the mob's reason for targeting Hypatia had more to do with her alliance with Orestes, himself a Christian, than anything she had taught as a scholar and philosopher.
We do not know much about Hypatia's background other than that she had a father named Theon, and her physical appearance remains unknown to the best of my knowledge. Although her name is of Greek origin, there are records of indigenous Egyptians assuming Greek names during the Greco-Roman periods, so I believe it is possible that she was of Egyptian (or other African) descent rather than strictly Greek as commonly shown in artistic portrayals.
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What if Gorosaurus, one of the giant dinosaur-based “kaiju” from Toho’s filmography, were added to Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse as a “Titan” alongside Godzilla and King Kong? I think he would make a worthy adversary for either of them!
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This is my redesign for the unmasked Adam from "Hazbin Hotel". Since he's supposed to represent the first human man on Earth, I thought he looked too much like a modern European dude, so I wanted to give him a look more like that of the earliest Homo sapiens (aka modern humans). His features, especially the prominent brow ridges, are based on those of basal Homo sapiens skulls such as the 160-kiloyear-old "Herto Man" specimen from Ethiopia pictured in the lower left corner.
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Silesaurus opolensis was an dinosauriform archosaur that lived in Europe during the Late Triassic Period around 220 million years ago. An insect-eater with a body length of around seven and a half feet, Silesaurus has been traditionally considered a member of a sister lineage to dinosaurs proper, but some recent paleontological analyses suggest that it may be a true dinosaur at the base of the ornithischian lineage (the grouping of dinosaurs that includes the duck-billed hadrosaurs, the armored stegosaurs and ankylosaurs, and the horn-faced ceratopsians). Like the ornithischians, Silesaurus appears to have had a beak covering the tip of its lower jaw (or predentary).
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Thumbnail time again! Here, we have Cleopatra and Amanirenas fighting Tarzan of the Apes, whom the Romans have forcibly plucked out of his native time via sorcery so they can have him assassinate the two troublesome Queens of the Nile in exchange for sending him home afterward. Can our heroines fend off the ape-man's attacks and then offer him an alternate route to his original time period?
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It is 30 BC in an alternate timeline, and the Romans have used a sorcerous rite powered by the time god Saturn to pluck Tarzan of the Apes out of the early 20th century into their own time. They tell the poor ape-man that they will let him return home only on the condition that he assassinate those two troublesome Queens of the Nile, Cleopatra of Egypt and Amanirenas of Kush. Can our two heroines fend off Tarzan’s attacks and then offer him an alternate path to his native time period?
This version of Tarzan, by the way, is my interpretation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original character.
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Out in the open waters of the western Pacific Ocean, a saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus) attacks a common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). True to their name, saltwater crocodiles do in fact cross the ocean around Southeast Asia and Oceania, and the remains of pelagic fish have been found in their stomachs, so it seems very conceivable to me that they could attack other animals in that part of the sea. Closer to coastal waters, saltwater crocodiles have been observed hunting marine creatures such as sharks, sea turtles, dugongs, and sawfish.
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A queen of medieval Mali stands on a balcony overlooking her mudbrick palace’s grounds. I love the Malian style of architecture, but damn, those rows of posts they have sticking out of it can be tedious to draw.
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This is my interpretation of Amanra, the fleet-footed and agile Nubian warrior princess from the real-time strategy game Age of Mythology‘s single-player campaign. Not only was she fierce, courageous, and noble, but she had quite an attractive design (as far as computer-game characters with low-poly models from the early 2000s went). I truly think she is an underrated heroine!
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This is a commissioned piece I did for a follower on DeviantArt who wanted me to draw an Afro-British superheroine of their design. The character is supposed to have the power to transform into a were-leopard as well as possessing other leopard-related powers. In all honesty, I feel that the orange costume in the reference images my commissioner sent me looks a bit too much like Vixen from DC Comics, and a yellow suit would better suit a leopard-themed character anyway, but I didn’t want to stray too far from the character’s established design either.
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Wanted to do a throwback to this 2019 piece of mine today...
This is my depiction of a little-known personage from the annals of imperial Chinese history, namely a woman named Li who was the mother of the Emperor Xiao Wuwen (373-397 AD, during the Jin Dynasty). According to the official chronicle “History of the Jin”, Li got her start as a concubine and and weaver whose colleagues had showered her with abuse for her being “tall and black” as well as a “kunlun” (the Chinese word for darker-skinned foreigners). Thankfully, this would ultimately play out like a classic Cinderella story for Li, since she found herself nominated as Empress (as in imperial consort) out of all the concubines.
I don’t think anyone knows for sure what Li’s ethnic heritage would have been, assuming she was a real person to begin with. The Chinese often used the word “kunlun” for African people, but in other cases it could apply to Negrito, Indian, or even “Mongoloid” Southeast Asians (e.g. Cambodians, Vietnamese, or Malays). Since none of those other ethnic groups are known for having distinctly tall stature like Li, however, I chose to go with an African interpretation for my portrayal of her.
By the way, the phrase Li is saying is supposed to be Mandarin Chinese for “Haters gonna hate!” Go show those catty concubines, my Empress!
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This is a head portrait of Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis, a proposed earlier cousin of T. rex thought to have hunted in the American Southwest around 72-70 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. For the most part, T. mcraeensis would have resembled its later and more famous relative, even reaching a similar size, but a shallower lower jaw suggests its bite might not have been quite as powerful as that of T. rex (although, make no mistake, it would have still ranked among the most powerful of any terrestrial carnivore known to science).
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These two represent a couple of basal Homo sapiens from Africa anywhere between 300,000 and 70,000 years ago, before our species dispersed out of the continent and throughout the rest of the world. I based their facial features off those of specimens like Jebel Irhoud, Omo Kibish, and Herto Man, although their influence may be more apparent in the man here since male humans tend to have more prominent brow ridges than females in any population.
Unlike some of my previous drawings of early modern humans, I wanted to give these ones less ragged clothing with some designs painted on them, analogous to the designs some later Aboriginal Australians would paint on their loincloths.
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Two thumbnails tonight. First is Astorgosuchus attacking Paraceratherium in Oligocene Asia, and the second is a Paleolithic huntress with her pet Megantereon in Pleistocene Africa.
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A Paleolithic huntress in Pleistocene Africa is showing some affection to her tame saber-toothed Megantereon. Humans may never have been able to fully domesticate any saber-toothed cats as far as we know, but I can still see some adopting cubs and raising them to be hunting companions. It would be like how people have trained lions and tigers to perform tricks in historical circuses.
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25 million years ago in Asia during the Oligocene Epoch, the crocodilian Astorgosuchus bugtiensis attacks a juvenile specimen of the giant hornless rhinoceros Paraceratherium bugtiensis.
Astorgosuchus was a close relative of true crocodiles (family Crocodylidae) that is estimated to have grown up to 26 feet long, making it a bit longer than the largest saltwater crocodiles today. There are memes going around the Internet claiming even larger sizes nearing 30 feet in length, but a paleontologist buddy of mine who specializes in reptiles tells me these are likely exaggerated. Goes to show you once again that you can’t trust everything you read on social media.
That being said, we have found juvenile Paraceratherium bones with crocodilian tooth marks, and it’s possible a predatory Astorgosuchus left them behind.
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This is my rendition of one of a fictional race of sapient fish called the "Deep Ones" that appear in H.P. Lovecraft's novella "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". In that story, the Deep Ones offer a small New England coastal town wealth in both jewelry and fish in exchange for the right to interbreed with its citizens, thereby conferring onto them their immortality and ability to live underwater. The results of this inter-species admixture is portrayed as a subject of horror for the narrating protagonist, which is of course in keeping with Lovecraft's unfortunately of-his-time views on "miscegenation". For my money, however, the Deep Ones in his story don't seem so bad as long as their relationships with the humans is strictly consensual.
I actually have recently drafted a short story featuring these creatures, but my version of them is much more malevolent toward humanity than Lovecraft's, abducting them for sacrifice to the "Great Old Ones" they venerate. The story is a simple tale about a Paleolithic African woman and her tame saber-toothed cat fending off a Deep One raid, with both already having a bad history with the creatures.
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This is gift art I did for my fellow artist Jonathan Price (aka “Dualmask”), featuring a martial-artist character of his design named Binah. I have to say it can be fun drawing other people’s characters in my own style!
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These are Vilimaini and Aisake, two characters I created for my earlier artwork “Dueling the Demon of the Deep” in which they fight the white sperm whale Moby Dick. Vilimaini is the niece of her community’s “big man” on a Melanesian island near Vanuatu, and Aisake is a tame saltwater crocodile she has raised up from the egg.
Melanesians, by the way, are a group of people who don’t seem to get that much love in fictional media. Even the Polynesians, who are later migrants to Oceania from Taiwan by way of Southeast Asia, get more media attention than the Melanesian peoples for some reason. I think that’s quite a shame, and I suspect there’s a racist reason for that disparity since Melanesians have retained darker skin and more tightly coiled hair than Polynesians (hence why they’ve historically been racialized as “Black” despite being more closely related at the genetic level to Asian than African peoples).
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^^ I remember nine years ago a movie from the island Tanna, in the island state of Vanuatu, got rather popular and written about in media. It was a beautiful and moving tale about love versus old traditions.
Otherwise, as you said one rarely hear about Melanesia in mainstream media
quote:Tanna is a 2015 Australian-Ni-Vanuatu film set on the island of Tanna in the South Pacific, depicting the true story of a couple who decided to marry for love, rather than obey their parents' wishes. Starring Marie Wawa and Mungau Dain, the film is based on an actual marriage dispute.
Tanna was the first film to be shot entirely on location in Vanuatu. The film won the Audience Award Pietro Barzisa at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival. It was selected as the Australian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards, and was nominated for the award in January 2017, the first time Australia's submission received a nomination.
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^ I'm not normally into serious drama movies, but I might check out that Tanna movie for its anthropological value.
Anyway...
This is my portrait of a man representing the Western Hunter-Gatherers, a population of hunter-gatherers that occupied western Europe between the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago and the arrival of agriculture 5,000 years ago. Genetic evidence recovered from their remains suggest that, while these people often sported blue eyes, they appear to lack the genetic alleles for lighter skin that are now ubiquitous in Europe, western Asia, and the Mediterranean basin, suggesting that they retained the darker skin tones of the earliest humans who evolved in Africa. Of course, it’s theoretically possible that the Western Hunter-Gatherers had evolved their own set of skin-lightening alleles separate from that of modern Europeans, but no evidence of such convergent evolution has been found yet, so I went with a darker skin tone for my depiction.
That being said, some hunter-gatherer populations who lived at the same time further east in Europe, known as the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, do appear to have had the alleles for lighter skin of modern Europeans, and it’s likely that these alleles originated in the very far north of Eurasia during the Pleistocene among a third population of people known as the Ancient North Eurasians. At any rate, the hunter-gatherer populations of Europe would find themselves absorbed by immigrating farmers of Anatolian origin who appear to have had Mediterranean pigmentation, thus initiating the Neolithic in Europe. These farmers in turn would absorb nomadic herdsmen from the steppes of western Eurasia who would bring Indo-European languages to the region, and this mixture would produce the modern European populations.
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This is my portrayal of an ancient Egyptian archer. In the Egyptian military, archers could be indigenous Egyptians (aka Kemetians) like this gentleman here or mercenaries hired from the “Land of the Bow” (or what we now call Nubia) further up the Nile. In either case, their bows would have been what are called self bows, or bows made from one piece of wood, before the Hyksos brought in the composite bow (made from multiple pieces of wood) when they invaded northern Egypt from the Middle East around 1700 BC.
The white diagonal straps over this Egyptian archer’s body are referenced from an Old Kingdom tomb relief that probably came from the Giza area, and his basket-like quiver is based on one from the Middle Kingdom uncovered at the site of Deir el-Bahri near modern Luxor. In retrospect, the arrow came out longer than I intended, but I suppose really long arrows could have always existed.
An article in LiveScience by Stacy Keltner suggests that australopithecines like the iconic “Lucy” may not have had a thick chimpanzee-like covering of hair as traditionally depicted, but instead may have already evolved the thinner (or “naked”) coat which we humans have inherited. She bases this on studies of human lice which suggest that our hair had already begun to thin 3-4 million years ago, or a little before Lucy’s time. Therefore, I wanted to see what Lucy would look like with a more human-like pattern of hair.
By the way, it’s such a shame that drawing female hominins from the pre-clothing era has the effect of making the artwork “not safe for work”, therefore limiting the places where I can share it.
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This adventuress was about to investigate some ancient cliff dwellings in a desert canyon when she chanced upon a prowling fin-backed pelycosaur. Will she be able to fend the carnivorous synapsid off with her trusty blade?
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Akhenhotep, a priest from the riverside kingdom of Hekaptah, has hired the vagabond Amozean sellsword Ezegbe to retrieve an ancient mask with sorcerous power from some abandoned cliff dwellings out in the desert. Now that Ezegbe has brought the mask back to Akhenhotep within the ruins of a temple his ancestor had commissioned, the priests explains what he plans to do with his power…much to the warrior from Amozey’s horror.
This illustration is a follow-up to my earlier “Canyon Confrontation” piece. They both depict scenes from a short “sword & sorcery story” I have written called “Mask of the Cliff-Dwellers” (which awaits review and revision now).
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Before any of our ancestors ever encountered the woolly mammoths of the Pleistocene far north, the earliest humans would have whetted their hunting skills on the mighty elephants and other great beasts of their African cradle. Indeed, it’s a common hypothesis that the wildlife of African evolving alongside humankind for the longest period allowed them to endure human pressure far better than large animals elsewhere in the world, hence why much of the megafauna in Africa is still around to this day. And we as humanity today must preserve them the best we can.
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Forty millennia ago, a huntress representing the Upper Paleolithic Aurignacian culture crouches on a ledge overlooking the chilly European steppes where megafauna such as woolly mammoths and rhinoceros roam. In her grip is a spear with a bone point that has been hafted to the shaft with birch tar glue. She might be scouting for game on behalf of her hunting party, or she might be calculating which animals they will single out for an attack!
If you’re wondering why she has blue eyes, a paper published in Experimental Dermatology in 2020 reported that, although the West Eurasian genetic alleles for lighter skin would have emerged no earlier than 28-22,000 years ago (and even then would have been restricted to the far east and north of Europe until much later), blue eyes might have emerged earlier, possibly dating back to 42,000 years ago. This would mean that many Upper Paleolithic Europeans would have had both dark skin and blue eyes, a combination of traits that remained widespread in western Europe before the arrival of Neolithic farmers from the region of Turkey around 8-5,000 years ago.
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Having a cave lion (Panthera spelaea) attack you and your partner while you two are tracking down a gravelly ravine in Ice Age Europe may not be most people’s idea of a romantic outing, but at least this Neanderthal/human couple has an experience to bond over as they fend off the big cat. And lucky for our heroes that it’s only one bachelor male lion this time, as a whole pride of these fierce felines would be a lot for two hominin hunters to handle!
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I’ve had a couple of small, poseable artist’s mannequins for a few years now. Out of a desire to experiment with a different form of creative expression from my usual, I decided to give them both coats of paint to make them look more human-like (by default they are gray). Afterward, with the help of modeling clay, toothpicks, and a sheet of bristol paper, I turned the male mannequin into an ancient Egyptian spearman (inspired by the painted wooden models from the tomb of Mesehti) and his female counterpart into a prehistoric huntress.
I admit that I was quite clumsy with both the clay and the paint job, but I’m nonetheless glad to have breathed more life into these mannequins.
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I made this Cretaceous diorama using an old shoebox, a printed copy of one of my jungle artworks, some brown modeling clay with green paint applied to the top, various plastic palm trees and plants, and a couple of my old toy dinosaurs.
The Papo dinosaur toy line these figures come from is interesting because they started out with designs faithfully adapting the Jurassic Park style (as you can see in their classic T. rex and Triceratops models), but then moved on to somewhat more accurate depictions of the animals’ anatomy. Still, they’ve always been gorgeous, even if photos of them have long been overused as stock images of dinosaurs.
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66 million years ago in Late Cretaceous North America, a herd of Kritosaurus navajovius gather around a salt lick in a jungle clearing. Licking minerals from the clay here provides these hadrosaurid dinosaurs with essential nutrients such as sodium, calcium, and zinc which helps with the animals’ physical growth. It’s a behavior many animals throughout the world carry out to this day.
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Exactly when prehistoric humans invented the bow and arrow remains shrouded in uncertainty, but the oldest uncovered arrowheads have been found in what is now South Africa and are dated to approximately 70,000 years ago. Outside of Africa, stone arrowheads of Paleolithic age have also been found at Grotte Mandrin in France (where they are dated to around 54,000 years ago) and the Fa Hien Cave in Sri Lanka (48,000 years old), as well as the pieces of a bow found at Mannheim-Vogelstang in Germany (18,000 years old). So while we may not consider bows and arrows to be as iconic a weapon for “cavemen” as spears or clubs, they do in fact go back quite far in our prehistory.
By the way, I used a public-domain photo of rhinoceros paintings from the Chauvet Cave in France for the background.
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A buddy of mine has been making riggable sprites out of his characters for use in video games he develops single-handedly. I wanted to emulate his process by adapting one of my own action heroines into that. The artistic side of the process is done, but now I have to rig the character in Dragon Bones Pro.
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Earlier this year, I drafted a novella titled Sinbad and the Lost Continent that was inspired by the Arabian Nights. The protagonist is not the famous Sinbad the Sailor but another character of the same name whom he inspires to embark on an epic voyage to the lost continent of Lemuria in search of ancient treasure. Anyway, enjoy this trailer for it while I prepare the book for publication on Amazon:
quote:This is the tale of Sinbad ibn Hassan, a poor porter in medieval Baghdad who, after hearing about the seven voyages of his more famous counterpart of the same name, sets out in search of treasure in the lost continent of Lemuria. There, along with his best friend Kishore, their cunning navigator Omar, and the fierce and beautiful native princess Nemong, will brave the Mesozoic monsters that call the continent’s jungles home. But dinosaurs and other wildlife are not the only peril they must face together on their quest for Lemuria’s ancient riches…
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This is my reconstruction of a Bronze Age Kushite spearman from the period between 1750-1550 BC, when the capital of Kush was located at the site of Kerma near the Third Cataract of the Nile (“cataract” being a stretch of rapids). Modern artistic portrayals of Kushite soldiery from this era often show them with leopard-skin loincloths, but it appears that cowhide or leather was the more usual material, although some Kushites also wore linen loincloths like the Egyptians further downriver. The Kushites are also known to have attached beadwork to their clothes during this period. The Kerma period of Kushite history would end with the New Kingdom Egyptian conquest after 1550 BC, but the Kushites would win back their independence with a second capital at Napata further up the Nile around 780 BC.
I admit to having had a difficult time looking up what the beadwork for a Kushite loincloth would have looked like, so I did two takes, with the second (below) having the lines of beads arranged in a net-like pattern.
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A daring young Egyptian prince must defeat a fire-breathing denwen serpent that has been terrorizing his subjects. His bronze shield is his best protection against the monster’s flaming exhalations, but will it be enough?
Although Nile Valley cultures did not regard snakes as always evil as the Abrahamic faiths of the Middle East would, there were still some malevolent serpents in their mythology. The most infamous of these was Apep, the representative of chaos who battled the sun god Ra every night, but another was the fiery denwen that the Egyptian Pyramid Texts mention as having come close to wiping out all the gods before the Pharaoh defeated it. One wonders if that story would eventually influence later myths of fire-breathing dragons…
I'm going to close this thread since it seems that bandwidth has become a scarce resource for the forum recently. It sucks, because I really like sharing my work here, but it's a sacrifice I might have to make to keep the forum up.
You can catch up with my work if you check out any of the social media links listed here:
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